social life. A natural harbor,
especially if it is at the mouth of a river, seems destined by nature
for a centre of commerce, as the falls of a swift-flowing stream
indicate the location of a manufacturing plant. A mineral-bearing
mountain invites to mining, and miles of forest land summon the
lumberman. Broad and well-watered plains seem designed for
agriculture, and on them acres of grain slowly mature through the
summer months to turn into golden harvests in the fall. The
Mississippi valley and the Western plain into which it blends have
become the granary of the American nation. The railroad-train that
rushes day and night from the Great Lakes toward the setting sun moves
hour after hour through the extensive rural districts that
characterize the great West. There are the mammoth farms that are
given to the one enormous crop of wheat or corn. Alongside the
railroad loom the immense elevators where the grain is stored to be
shipped to market. Here and there are the farm-buildings where the
owner or tenant lives, but villages are small and scattered and
community activity is slight.

Similarly, in the South before the Civil War there were large
plantations of cotton and tobacco, dotted only here and there with the
planter's mansion and clumps of negro cabins. Village life was not a
characteristic of Southern society. The old South had its picturesque
plantation life, and the aristocracy made its sociable visits from
family to family, but that rural type disappeared with the war. With
the breaking up of the old plantations there came a greater
diversification of agriculture, which is going on at an accelerated
pace, and social centres are increasing, but there is still much rural
isolation. Among the remoter mountains lingers the most conservative
American type of citizens in the arrested development of a century
ago, with antique tools and ancient methods, scratching a few acres
for a garden and corn-field, and living their backward, isolated life,
without comfort or even peace, and almost without social institutions.

In the East the country is more broken. Large farms are few, and
agriculture is carried on intensively as a business, or is united with
another occupation or as a diversion from the cares and tasks of the
town. Farms of a score to a few hundred acres, only part of which are
cultivated, form rural communities among the hills or along a river
valley. Here and there a few houses cluster in village or h